Latest news with #anti-Putin
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
How progressive critics paved the way for Trump's attack on judicial supremacy
One of the key axioms of politics in our, and any other, era is that nothing lasts forever. Today's seemingly new political arguments, almost certainly, will find their way into an opponent's arsenal. Evidence of that axiom is abundant. Where once Republicans were rapidly anti-Russia and anti-Putin, today they favor accommodation. Where once Democrats were suspicious of free trade, today they embrace it as part of their criticism of the president's protectionism. The most consequential of those inversions involves attitudes toward courts and judges. Where once progressive critics called the rule of law a myth and worked to expose the politics of law, today the president mobilizes that argument to accuse judges of being driven by partisan motivations. In the first Trump administration, as the president stacked the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary with MAGA-allied judges, progressives eagerly denounced those judges and what they labelled 'judicial supremacy.' They argued that the authority to interpret the Constitution was not lodged solely in the judicial branch. It was, they contended, also the work of the other branches, and the American people themselves, to say what the law is. Now, they are appalled when members of the Trump Administration take up those arguments and offer constitutional arguments of their own. Before saying more about the source of attacks on the courts and positions now being appropriated by the Trump administration, let me cite a few examples of its escalating critiques of judicial supremacy. On May 20, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered his own rendition of the powers and jurisdiction of the federal courts. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation case, and the administration's reluctance to 'facilitate' his return, Rubio insisted that he does not have to obey court orders when they touch on the foreign policy of the United States. 'There is,' Rubio said, 'a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy.' The Secretary of State insisted that 'No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if I do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.' Rubio is not the only one in the administration to act as if they get to define what the Constitution means or what authority courts have. Two months ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed Federal District Judge James Boasberg, who, as NBC News noted 'is presiding over the case involving the administration's use of the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act to deport what officials claim are gang members to El Salvador' was 'trying to control our entire foreign policy,' and that under the Constitution, he 'cannot do it.' And then there is the recent insistence of White House staffer Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that the president has the right to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Some might call these comments unconstitutional or anti-constitutional, but I suspect they would say that they have as much right to interpret the Constitution as the judicial branch. That is the position of conservative allies of the administration. Adrian Vermeule, for example, Professor of Law at Harvard, argues that the law 'is to a large degree what the President and the agencies say it is.' And 'The President, as a key figure in the republic, has a responsibility to interpret the Constitution in a way that promotes the common good and effective governance.' This brings us back to the fact that arguments made with the goal of advancing one political program may be flipped and turned to another purpose. It was not so long ago that progressives chaffing under the rulings of the Roberts Court called for the same kind of diffusion of the authority to interpret the Constitution that we are now seeing from the Trump Administration. In September 2020, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie quoted with approval the following: ''The judiciary is not the sole guardian of our constitutional inheritance and interpretive authority under the Constitution has varied over time.'' In his own voice, he said: '(I)f protecting the right of the people to govern for themselves means curbing judicial power and the Supreme Court's claim to judicial supremacy, then Democrats should act without hesitation.' Twenty years earlier, two progressive constitutional law scholars reacted to an increasingly conservative Supreme Court's erosion of the Warren Court's pro-criminal defendant Miranda v. Arizona decision by calling for what they called 'shared constitutional experimentation.' As they put it, 'Because constitutional meaning is so wrapped up in broader questions of governance, constitutional interpretation should be a shared endeavor among (at the least) all the branches of the national, state, and local governments. Each branch brings to the process both a constitutional role and a set of institutional advantages….' A few years earlier, another law professor argued that 'competition and debate among the branches concerning important constitutional issues may well promote the kind of public dialogue that would lead to adoption of constructive constitutional approaches while enhancing respect for the fundamental values inherent in constitutionalism.' One final example is drawn from the work of two prominent, progressive constitutional law scholars, Yale's Robert Post and Reva Siegel. They observe that it would 'be a fundamental mistake to define constitutional law in ways that force nonjudicial actors regularly to choose between obeying constitutional law and fulfilling what they regard as their constitutional obligations.' Trump administration officials would likely agree. They might claim to be engaged in the very form of constitutional interpretation and dialogue that Bouie and others on the left have held out as a healthy and welcome. Or, perhaps more accurately, they may be owning the libs by cynically using their arguments to secure the administration's own political purposes. Whatever their motive, using the tools of progressive constitutional scholars, Trump and his colleagues are creating what Princeton's Kim Lane Scheppele labels a 'counter-constitution, an alternative constitutional reality proposed in place of a current constitution.' That is why, if the Constitution survives this moment, we should be cautious about calling for the dismantling of the courts' ultimate authority to advance the political cause of the moment. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall got it right when, more than two centuries ago, he wrote, 'It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.' All of this is a reminder that in a constitutional republic, officials, citizens, and commentators need to take a long view and think not just of what will advance their immediate interest. Prudence requires considering what things would look like if, and when, their opponents come to power. Patience and foresight are underappreciated, but indispensable virtues of constitutional government.
Metro
7 days ago
- Politics
- Metro
Russian court bans memes portraying Putin as modern-day Hitler
Russia has banned dozens of memes depicting Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler because they supposedly 'encourage terrorist activities'. A regional court declared all images contained on 12 webpages 'prohibited for distribution'. They include 88 results from a search on a Russian image hosting site for the term 'Putler Kaput'. A slogan popular among anti-Putin activists, it literally means 'Putler Broken', deliberately merging the surnames of Putin and Hitler. The memes include images of the Russian president with the Nazi leader's infamous mustache and fringe superimposed on his face. The court also banned images searched on a similar site using the term 'kaput', only they include dozens of pictures that have nothing to do with Putin. Most of them are stills or promotional images associated with the 2008 Russian spy comedy 'Hitler Goes Kaput!', in which a Soviet officer infiltrates the SS and kidnap Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun. Other banned images include photos taken at anti-war protests in Russia, and graffiti on a wall in Paris showing a young girl waving a Ukrainian flag while trampling on miniature tanks. The court also outlawed a painting of sunflowers growing out of an upturned Russian military helmet which has a bullet hole leaking blood from it. Russian state prosecutors said the webpages were found during 'monitoring of the internet' required by counter-terror legislation. More Trending According to the court's ruling, issued earlier this month, they said the images and inscriptions 'discredit the President of the Russian federation'. They argued the memes 'negatively affect the interests of society and the state' and 'encourage an indefinite number of persons to commit terrorist activities'. Judges at the Kirov District Court of Omsk, where the case was heard, said the prosecutors' claimed were all 'justified' and ruled in favour of the ban. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Ex-CIA chief reveals where in Europe he thinks Putin will invade next MORE: Putin 'war hero' behind Mariupol strikes killed in 'suicide bombing' in Russia MORE: Royal Navy scrambled to monitor Russian ship loitering in UK waters
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Pussy Riot Artist Is Back in Prison (This Time, by Design)
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, has long experienced the threat — and reality — of government surveillance. After the group's anti-Putin, balaclava-wearing, punk-inspired performance at Moscow's main Orthodox Cathedral in 2012, she spent nearly two years in Russian prison. On her release, she was tracked by the police. Since 2021, the year when she was declared a 'foreign agent' by Russia's ministry of justice, she has lived in exile, bouncing from city to city in what she calls a state of 'geo-anonymity.' Next month, the outspoken Russian activist and artist will be subject to another kind of surveillance — in a jail of her own making. From June 5 to 14, Tolokonnikova, 35, will be spending her days in a corrugated-steel replica of a decrepit Russian prison cell, installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles. She will eat, drink and use the toilet in her 'cell,' and will perform some of her aggressive noise-music rage-screeds there. Visitors can watch her through peep holes and a security camera feed. 'It's my first durational performance,' she said, using a term for the stamina-testing genre popularized by the artist Marina Abramovic, who is a close friend. Tolokonnikova was sipping tea at a long, pink-rimmed table in the shape of a Russian Orthodox cross — her own design — in a temporary studio in Los Angeles. 'I'm used to the intensity of short outbursts of energy.' The MOCA show, 'Police State,' is in one sense a reckoning with her incarceration, during which she went on three hunger strikes and published an open letter describing 'slavery-like conditions.' She recalls how women in her penal colony were forced to work 17-hour shifts in a sewing factory at risk of injuries and even death. She has since tried TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation), anti-depressants and psychotherapy to process the experience, with mixed results. 'For me personally talk therapy didn't work — I don't love to talk about my feelings. But I'm interested in renegotiating trauma, rewriting your own personal history to bring your creativity into the mix,' she said. 'This is art therapy, basically.' At another level, the museum show is a condemnation of carceral conditions and human rights violations in her homeland and beyond. The idea came, she said, after she saw a concrete-box replica of the brutal solitary cell used to confine her friend and mentor, the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024. Tolokonnikova called this installation, created by his younger brother, Oleg, 'one of the best works of public art and political art I've seen. 'The police state isn't a distant experience for me and those I care about,' she added in her soft-spoken cadences — the message more pointed than the delivery. 'Russia has more than a thousand political prisoners, whose only fault was to say that the emperor is naked. The best people of Russia are behind bars.' Since 'Police State' is debuting during a time of high-profile detentions and deportations by the Trump administration, it is bound to be read as a critique of this government's actions as well. 'I think she's really speaking to the current political moment,' said Alex Sloane, the associate curator of MOCA, who is developing the project. 'We can't see these things — the human rights abuses, government overreach and the targeting of specific communities — as being isolated to Russia any more.' Or as Tolokonnikova quipped at the studio: 'Authoritarianism is like a sexually transmitted disease — you have it before you know it.' She went on to describe the rise of a 'tech-bro oligarchy' in the United States and rapidly shifting international alliances, which she said could impact her safety. 'Travel has become increasingly dangerous for me, mostly because I was put on this international wanted list by Russia at the start of the year, but also because of Trump becoming more friendly with Putin.' She pulled out a bag of red foam clown noses, offered me one and popped one on herself. She broke out laughing and suddenly looked like a goofy teenager, her black plaid skirt giving strong schoolgirl vibes. 'Imagine being so serious and worrying about your safety all the time. Put the clown nose on and everything is just fine,' she said, noting that she originally used the noses to 'troll' her clown-fearing husband, John Caldwell. This tension between gravity and levity, and a razor-sharp sense of humor, infuses many of her artworks. While she continues to organize some collective street actions under the Pussy Riot rubric, she has recently been showing painting and sculpture, or more accurately objects akin to them, in gallery and museum settings under her own name. Her first solo museum show, 'RAGE,' opened at OK Linz in Austria last summer. This month, she has one exhibition at Nagel Draxler gallery in Berlin, 'Wanted,' and another at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles, 'Punk's Not Dead.' And surrounding the mock prison cell at MOCA, she is installing her artworks and sculptural elements, including a gumball machine she's filling with colorful balls marked with the names of poisons, like Polonium and Novichok, which have been used on Russian dissidents. The centerpiece of 'Punk's Not Dead' is a stainless steel slide that you might imagine on a playground if its surface did not resemble a supersized cheese grater. The show also contains several of her new 'Icons' paintings, embellished with medieval Cyrillic calligraphy, enigmatic crosses and other invented symbols of devotion. 'Punk's Not Dead' began with a January residency at Honor Fraser, where Tolokonnikova gave an earsplitting performance as part of the group Pussy Riot Siberia. Her musical instruments were aluminum riot shields that she 'played' by scratching them with brass knuckles and other tools and carving them with hearts and anarchy signs. The riot shields now hang in the gallery like a vandalized series by Donald Judd. The gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who gave her a pop-up show in 2023, said he is not surprised that Tolokonnikova is increasingly using galleries and museums as a media platform. 'From the very beginning she's been an artist,' he said. 'When Pussy Riot did their famous performance at the Moscow cathedral, they were not a group of trained musicians but really performance artists.' Now, he added, 'you have this integration of performance, art, activism and this charismatic persona — she wraps it all together.' Still, it hasn't been easy for Tolokonnikova to find venues for her art. 'Someone told me the art world is harder to navigate than Russian jail,' she said, smiling at the thought. But so far, she said, 'having people tell me no or ghosting me is annoying' but nothing like having 'a squad of riot police invade your exhibit.' A more substantial challenge: bringing something of the live-wire intensity of street performance into the museum world. 'It's much more explosive and abrasive to perform something for 40 seconds, when you have to deliver a message before you're dragged by the feet by the police,' she acknowledged. 'But after I got out of jail it became almost impossible for me to make work in the same way because I was under police surveillance 24-7 and my phone was tapped. 'I didn't want to get killed,' she added, 'so I was pushed into the studio work.' She said she's learning from artists like Abramovic, Valie Export and Yoko Ono, who have made provocative work within safe spaces. She also speaks admiringly of the 'total installations' of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who would go so far as to recreate grimy Soviet-era apartments in the name of art. Her first solo gallery show, at Deitch's gallery in 2023, featured the multipart project, 'Putin's Ashes.' Outraged by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, she invited women who shared her anger — Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian — to join her in the desert for a ritualistic burning of a portrait of the Russian president. At the end of the performance, documented in a short film, she deposited the ashes into glass vials. Deitch showed both the film and vials, which she had shrouded, using her prison-era sewing skills, in fake fur. The exhibition prompted the Russian government to file a new criminal charge against her for insulting religious believers; placement on a 'most wanted criminals' list and a warrant for her 'arrest in absentia' followed. 'My job for quite a while, the last 15 years of my activism, is to hurt Vladimir Putin as much as I humanly can,' she told MSNBC'S Lawrence O'Donnell, 'and the instrument of my war is my art. We know that he's incredibly superstitious, so he might actually be afraid.' When 'Putin's Ashes' traveled to a gallery in Santa Fe, she experimented with recreating some elements of a Russian prison cell and hung out there for a while on opening night, using a homemade shiv to carve some graffiti into a wooden table. As an introvert, albeit one with exhibitionist tendencies, she said she found it a convenient way to avoid small talk with the crowd. In her MOCA cell she will be installing some drawings made by Russian political prisoners, including Valeria Zotova, who is serving a six-year prison sentence after being accused of planning a terrorist attack. Tolokonnikova will also play a keyboard and other instruments, layered with audio tracks from actual prisons. 'The music is going to be at times very gentle and beautiful and reminiscent of my childhood,' she said, explaining that she will sing lullabies that remind her of her mother, who died last summer in Russia. At other times, 'there are going to be screams of pain, or screams of rage, screams of power.' She is rehearsing the music, but not training physically, for the project. 'It's not as strict as Marina's performance,' she said, referring to Abramovic's physically punishing 2010 durational work, 'The Artist Is Present,' at the Museum of Modern Art. 'It's not about putting physical constraints on my body — I've done that enough in an actual prison environment. Yes, I can go without food for 10 days,' she said. 'To repeat it in a museum environment to me would almost look like a gimmick. What's interesting to me is to be this living and breathing heart of the installation.'
Mint
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
A battlefield death that spelled the end for Russia's opposition
Before Ildar Dadin took up arms for Ukraine, he spent years in Russia arguing that nonviolent resistance was the best way to unseat Vladimir Putin. He took part in every rally he could against the Russian leader, enduring years of brutal torture in prison and alienating friends and family in Moscow through his uncompromising stance. Other dissidents fled into exile. Most tried to build easier lives abroad as Putin's government suppressed all forms of protest while the war unfolded. But Dadin concluded that the struggle against Putin was now best fought in Ukraine, on the battlefields. 'The only path left is the armed one," he told a military recruiter in Poland before traveling to the front lines to fight. 'Anything else amounts to a deceitful and cynical defense of our own inaction." The arc of Dadin's life—from security guard in Moscow's suburbs to pacifist protester and, finally, to the trenches of Ukraine—reflects the narrowing options available to Putin's few remaining opponents in the face of growing repression, and their compatriots' overwhelming apathy. Three years into the war, Putin's opposition is divided and diffuse. Its activists lead marches through European capitals, publishing anti-Putin tirades and feuding with each other on social media. Others lie low in Russia. A small number risk jail or death by setting fire to army-recruitment offices or sabotaging rail lines inside the country. Dadin calculated that a bigger gesture would be required. By leaving for Ukraine, he tapped into a thread of self-sacrifice that runs through Russia's history: from Old Believers who set themselves on fire to protest the tsarist state, to Alexei Navalny, the Putin foe who returned to Russia to be arrested and died in an Arctic prison colony last year. Even being killed in a foxhole was preferable to remaining on the sidelines. Several months before first firing a weapon in Ukraine, he told the recruiter: 'If some day the people living in Russia will live better, then I'm confident my actions bring this moment closer." Dadin's initiation into Russia's opposition movement began in 2011. He quit his dead-end job as a security guard to take part in a wave of protests then sweeping the Russian capital, after a series of stage-managed elections had tightened Putin's hold on the country. The movement had adopted a white ribbon as a symbol of its fight for transparency and peaceful protest, and Dadin, an admirer of Indian independence movement leader Mahatma Gandhi, was a natural fit. Each time he was detained at the protests, Dadin would interlock his fingers to avoid accidentally striking one of the police officers, friends say. One time he addressed reporters through the barred window of a riot van after a severe beating by the police. 'Putin will answer for his crimes before the Russian nation," he said, his white T-shirt drenched in his own blood. Dadin was meticulous to a fault. He neither smoked nor drank nor cursed, friends say. He camped outside police stations where protesters were held. When activists gathered for a restaurant dinner after hours on the street chanting, 'We will not go anywhere!", Dadin denounced their hypocrisy and went home in a huff, said Olga Romanova, a friend and fellow activist now living abroad. 'He was so uncompromising in his principles that it was uncomfortable," said Romanova. 'You felt self-conscious about your nice apartment, about the butter in your fridge, about the decent shoes on your feet." In May 2012, the Moscow protests turned violent. Demonstrators pelted police with rocks and beer bottles, snatching their helmets and hanging them on trees as trophies. Riot police responded with baton charges and pepper spray. But far from swelling the movement's ranks, the crackdown presaged its collapse. Rattled by the protests, which he said were incited and financed by the West, Putin passed a series of repressive laws. Dozens of activists were jailed. Many abandoned the fight, settling into a tense but less exhausting coexistence with the state. Dadin, who had just turned 30, only increased his activism. His stocky frame and receding hairline were visible at every protest, from gay-rights rallies to demonstrations against plans for building over city parks. He made ends meet by taking on odd jobs and crashing on friends' couches. In 2013, he traveled to Kyiv to join the revolution that would topple Ukraine's pro-Moscow government. Dadin saw how police violence, which in Russia had cowed the protesters into submission, had served in Ukraine to instead grow the movement's ranks. Back in Moscow in early 2015, he was arrested at another rally and charged with repeatedly joining antigovernment protests under new legislation now known colloquially as 'Dadin's law." Before a judge handed him a 2 ½-year sentence, Dadin quoted Gandhi and told reporters he would willingly go to prison if it helped his cause. 'If I flee, as some do, then I'll be a passive accomplice to this deepening fascism," he said. By the time he walked free, the opposition had fractured and had little appetite for the kinds of sacrifices Dadin extolled. He too was damaged. Prison torture had left him with epilepsy and a permanent stammer. His marriage fell apart. He broke ties with his father, who backed Putin. With political rallies now outlawed, he mostly stood alone near the Kremlin holding up anti-Putin slogans, heckled by passersby. When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dadin decided he would have more impact in Ukraine than he would in a Russian prison as the state's crackdown deepened. He traveled to Poland and began inquiring about service in the Ukrainian armed forces. In spring 2023 he met in Warsaw with Denis Sokolov, a Russian who was helping Ukraine recruit fighters for units made up of Russian citizens vetted by Kyiv's military intelligence agency, HUR. 'I want to either die in battle, ending the turmoil of my guilt, or clear my conscience enough so I can once again live in harmony," he wrote to Irina Belacheu, an old friend from the opposition movement who now lives in Kyiv. 'Anything other than direct action will destroy me even further from the inside, and I cannot go on living like this." Since many of the Siberian Battalion's fighters had families in Russia, their identities were protected. Most didn't know even the first names of the men they fought alongside, current and former fighters said. Dadin became known by the call sign he chose: Gandhi. He quickly earned a reputation for both stubbornness and bravery. He was liable to turn petty spats over food rations into conversations about life's higher truths, irritating fellow servicemen, but he was also remarkably eager to cut his teeth in battle. Siberian Battalion soldiers said that when commanders used a chat on the Signal app to solicit volunteers for dangerous missions, Dadin was always the first to respond with a '+"—military code for assent. On a mission near Avdiivka in November 2023, his first-ever taste of combat, he spent 12 hours treating a wounded Ukrainian soldier in the gray zone long after his unit had received an order to withdraw. 'He stayed with him to alleviate the final moments of his life," said Alexey Makarov, a fellow fighter who was wounded in that operation. 'Simply so he wouldn't die alone." Dadin was one of the few Siberian Battalion fighters who never hid his identity, and Russia began to take notice. Putin compared the several thousand Russians who were fighting for Ukraine to Soviet citizens who joined the Nazis during World War II, while an anchor on Russian state television asked in 2023: 'Surely Dadin doesn't expect to get away with this treason?" In early 2024 he joined Ukraine's biggest unit of fighting Russians, the Freedom of Russia Legion. He also became increasingly well-known among the remaining dissidents. Sokolov, the man who recruited him in Poland, said Dadin could inspire others to stand up against Putin. 'His life is a symbol of what we wanted to build" in Russia, he said. 'And what we will build, if we don't die in the process." Dadin's willingness to serve where the fighting was fiercest brought him in October last year to one of the hottest sections of the front line, in Ukraine's northeast. On the morning of Oct. 5, he and another infantryman, a 23-year-old with the call sign Sokar, received an order over the radio to assist in the evacuation of a severely wounded soldier from their unit. After spending four days in a foxhole under withering artillery fire, Dadin jumped into action. 'He was so energized by the idea of saving someone that we rushed off with no time to properly plan our route," Sokar said. They ascended to the top of a steep bank and sprinted to a windbreak, chased by Russian drones. Then they buried themselves into the side of a small hill, targeted by unseen enemy troops positioned nearby. A bullet tore into Dadin's right buttock, and another severed an artery in his left leg. Sokar dragged Dadin behind a tree and gave him first aid, calling his unit commander over the radio. He kept talking to Dadin, who was losing blood fast. 'Every time I asked him something, I could tell he was slipping further and further away," Sokar said. The team commander arrived with another soldier, but a grenade dropped from a Russian drone hit Sokar with shrapnel and badly wounded the other soldier. The commander told Sokar they would have to abandon the other two. 'We can't get them out," he said. They sprinted back to base. Dadin's body lay for two weeks in no man's land, exposed to the elements. The Ukrainians initially kept his death secret, to prevent Russia from retrieving his body for propaganda purposes. Collecting his corpse was deemed too dangerous until there was sufficient cloud or rain to conceal a recovery mission. Finally, on a windy morning at the end of October, Dadin's fellow fighters gathered in Kyiv to lay his body to rest. Flanked by Ukrainian flags, with many shielding their faces behind balaclavas, the Russians saluted him in turn. Write to Matthew Luxmoore at
Daily Mirror
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
CHRIS HUGHES: Putin general's assassination reveals chilling covert ops against Kremlin
The killing of Russian Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik today came in the wake of a string of covert operations missions serving Ukraine's military aims. Just days ago a Russian Su-30SM fighter bomber was blown up 700 miles deep inside the border from Ukraine- massively exposing Moscow's security apparatus. Both major hits represent a huge undermining of Putin's defence security and seriously undermine any thought that Russia's internal intelligence network is fit for purpose. Strategically the loss of such a military figure and any major military warfare equipment such as a bomber whittles down Moscow's capability, which is already significantly depleted. But this latest killing in a Moscow suburb is huge for other and perhaps more hamrful reasons - it has sent shock waves through Russia's hierarchy and will foment paranoia, diverting from the war effort. This seriously eats away at confidence in Putin's regime. It is likely whoever planted the bomb will have been paid for the operation, hired at arm's length by anti-Putin groups, possibly working on behalf of Ukraine. The manhunt will be huge so this is a high-risk assasination as it is also likely a person will have had to physically witness the bombing to report back. Only in December Kremlin nuclear and chemical warfare chief Lt Gen Igor Kirillov was blasted to death by a bomb placed in an innocent-looking scooter outside his Moscow home. So far nobody has claimed responsibility for today's assasination but Moskalik was a senior officer within the strategy unit of the Russian armed forces. This will force others like him to watch their backs, be on high-alert and nervous, undermining their confidence and ability to move at will even in their own city. Psychologically the effect will be devastating - if Putin cannot keep them safe far from the front line then questions will be asked. It appears the Volkswagen containing the bomb blew up as he walked past near his home so, again, at least one person involved in the plot may have been there as no timer was used. There is also a possibility it was detonated remotely using a phone signal if a live camera had been placed near the Volkswagen but we may not know for some time. It is possible nobody will claim the bombing, even if Ukraine did directly arrange it because the mystery further undermines Putin's apparatus. Perhaps it will benefit Kyiv to let people think there is a growing anti-Putin movement in Russia, which does also seem to be the case. It is possible some of these operations are carried out by Ukrainians but more likely they are done by disenchanted Russians or Russian speakers, trained and hired for this purpose. They could have been trained outside Russia or Ukraine, ammunition and explosives caches hidden months before in preparation for a major mission. It is also possible it was a joint operation conducted by Ukraine and special forces or intelligence operators working for outside countries allied to Ukraine. No matter how arm's length it was - the finger of suspicion will be directed towards Kyiv - but it comes in the wake of three years of atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. Hours before today's Moscow blast Ukraine's Main Intelligence Directorate reported the blowing up of a Russian Su-30SM fighter jet following what it described as a 'successful sabotage operation.' The agency showed on Telegram the jet burning in the distance, accompanied by the message: 'An enemy Su-30SM fighter jet was destroyed in Russia - resistance to Putinism is growing.' It was claimed the sabotage incident occurred at the Rostov-on-Don Central airfield, 700 miles from Ukraine, where the aircraft caught fire and burned down. According to the intelligence agency, saboteurs successfully infiltrated the site and destroyed the plane. In mid-December 2024, Ukrainian intelligence carried out a successful sabotage operation in Russia's Krasnodar Krai, a region in the North Caucasus bordering the Black and Azov Seas. That mission resulted in the destroying of an Su -30 fighter and blowing up of three locomotives, another of many major sabotage missions by Ukrainian special operations units. All of this is a blow to Putin's security and image as the big strongman protector of the motherland.
